Winklevoss Twins Insist Bitcoin Will Be Worth 40 Times Its Value

These days we’re constantly seeing Bitcoin predictions from people in positions of influence. Most recently, the Winklevoss twins stated in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday that they believe the value of bitcoin stands to grow immensely.

The famous Winklevoss twins are former Olympic rowers turned internet entrepreneurs. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss received $65 million in 2004 when they sued Mark Zuckerberg, claiming he stole their idea when he created Facebook. The twins then founded the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange in 2015. Now, they claim to own 1% of all bitcoin. They became the first bitcoin billionaires when the currency reached over $11,000 late last year.

The twins’ stake in bitcoin places them at the forefront of what’s going on. Now they’re insisting that bitcoin will be worth 30 to 40 times its current value one day. They explained the digital currency’s recent depreciation in value as temporary and stated that people are simply failing to realize its full potential.

The Winklevoss twins believe that people are missing the main point about the utility of cryptocurrency. People are thinking about cryptocurrencies being used in person-to-person transactions. Understandably, many see problems with this as cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile. It’s difficult for vendors to price things and for buyers to feel comfortable making purchases when the currency fluctuates in value so quickly.

The twins believe instead that bitcoin’s real value lies in its potential to be used in machine-to-machine interactions, such as a driverless car paying another driverless car. According to them, the full potential for Bitcoin is in devices making micropayments to each other. They also compare bitcoin to gold, explaining how gold is valuable because of its scarcity. While bitcoin’s fixed supply makes it even more than scarce.

The twins have fought much criticism directed at digital currency by leading business figures and banks. These criticisms include opinions that cryptocurrencies are bound to crash and claims that Bitcoin is a fraud. In response, Tyler Winklevoss stated that these criticisms were the result of a “failure of imagination”. The twins claim that older financiers don’t understand the nature of digital currency and why it stands to revolutionize the system of money in our future. They argue that some people have become wedded to the framework of money being a solid, physical object and can’t wrap their brains around the possibility that it could be anything other than that.

Of course, the twins stand to gain a lot from Bitcoin’s success, so it makes sense for them to talk up the digital currency. Yet many cryptocurrency experts are in agreement with their predictions. For example, head of APAC Business Development at cryptocurrency exchange Gatecoin, Thomas Glucksmann, just made a supporting prediction this week. He told CNBC that he expects bitcoin to reach $50,000 by the end of 2018 while the cryptocurrency market hits $1 trillion. He attributes this claim to “increasing regulatory recognition of cryptocurrency exchanges”. Additionally, he cites the technological developments that we’re seeing in the industry such as bitcoin’s Lightning Network which stands to boost transaction speeds.